The life and times of two grad students and their baby who doesn't sleep.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Busy as little Grad Student Worker Bees

If there's anyone still reading this, you may have noticed that I've changed the blog around a bit. I decided to mess with a new template and made it very very purple. We are back from Ohio and are back to work. Dan is teaching a class on Modern Political Theory that is going pretty well so far. He's also supposed to be working on his dissertation and getting papers out for publication.

I am supposed to be reading for comps, and working on publications, and preparing for the class that I might be teaching in July and August. What I have actually been doing is conducting a massive cleaning/organizing spree of the apartment. I'm almost done, so I should have pictures up next week (pictures of where we live, only a year after we moved in!).

I leave for a week long ICPSR workshop on time series in Ann Arbor, MI on the 19th of June. This is also affectionately known as math camp in our department. I'm pretty excited, although a little worried that my stats background will not be advanced enough. I'm sure I'll be fine though, I'm a quick learner and I'm persistent enough to bug the professor teaching the class if I'm not getting it.

On Saturday my friend Jamie and I are throwing our friend Sarah a baby shower. I'm super excited about it (and about Baby Hampson)! Hopefully I'll be able to take some pictures there as well. I still need to write up a post with pictures from Chicago.

Another post that I have been meaning to do is a recap of PAX East, which was amazing. The primary reason for the delay was the great camera fiasco of 2010. So we forgot to bring our camera to PAX. Because we are idiots or something. I don't know. It was even on the list. But we left with no camera. And realized as we were waiting for the train near our hotel to take us into the city. I watched someone else take a picture of his friend and it hit me, our camera, at home, not with us, OH NOES! So after a quick consultation with Dan, we decided to hit up a Best Buy or other such store, pick up a cheap digital camera, and use that, because decent disposable cameras cost usually around $10 each, it would make more sense, and be easier to carry, and easier to put the pictures on our computer if we just got an inexpensive digital camera. So we did that. Best Buy had a camera package on sale for like $50, and we grabbed a larger memory card and thought we were all set. The camera works fine, we get tons of pictures, very exciting. We bring the camera to school on Monday to show everyone pictures. The next day we can't find the camera. We look everywhere. We empty all of our bags. We search the car. We check our desks at school. Nothing. So we decide that we must have left it at school and someone took it, it's not like anyone ever locks our office. We become very paranoid about leaving our computers in the office.

Fast forward to two months later, I'm in Chicago and emptying out my purse so that I don't have to carry so much stuff around and I find the camera. Keep in mind that I have emptied this purse three or four times since PAX. I have flipped it upside down with the pockets unzipped to get crumbs out. But yet, the camera is there. There was much rejoicing. We do not understand how this has happened, but we're just happy that we have our camera back and our PAX pictures. Which we will post on the blog very soon.

Now that it is summer I have also been reading a bit more, rereading some of my old favorites (Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince and Dragon Star trilogies, and the Sorcery and Cecelia Trilogy by Pat Wrede and Caroline Stevermer), and finding new books to enjoy (The Elemental Masters books by Mercedes Lackey and a couple books by Joanna Bourne). I've also enjoyed the Kindle app for my iPod Touch. It has made reading and buying books while traveling very convenient.

I've started playing Kingdom Hearts again, and I've finally gotten off the island and into the story. It's becoming more fun. Dan and I started playing Mario Galaxy, which I think we are going to do for an hour or so before we go to bed.